The Consolidated Dispatch Agency wants an outside consultant to study whether its troubled Motorola computer-aided dispatch system should be ditched and replaced.

The board, made up of Leon County Administrator Vince Long, Tallahassee City Manager Anita Favors Thompson and Leon County Sheriff Mike Wood, voted unanimously Monday to recommend the hiring of information technology research and advisory company Gartner, Inc.

The firm's analysis will include a complete review of the existing CAD system and assess the risk, cost and time associated with going to a different system and vendor. The $140,000 cost of the study will be split between the city, county and Sheriff's Office.

"They will provide a definitive recommendation if we should keep the existing system or transition to another system," said Sabrina Holloman, the city's chief information systems officer.

Pending approval by the city and county commissions this week, the comprehensive review of the system will begin next week and is expected to take six to eight weeks.

The CDA has not yet completed paying Motorola for the $2.4-million system in place now. How the CDA would get out of the contract, board members said, is something their legal staff would have to determine if they were to go with a new vendor.

But board members said it was time to seriously consider whether the nearly 20-month-old system, which has been beset by software problems, should be abandoned. The move came less than a week after the second of two hours-long outages of officer mobile data computers in less than a month. Board members said the latest problems prompted them to recommend the study.

"We need that experience from someone who has no dog in the hunt," said Favors Thompson, "to be able to tell us, 'Either you stay on this path and you work out these details as they come forward because this is expected, or its really time for you to look at something different.'"

Long said the CDA and Motorola have tried to work out the problems that have arisen, but "at this point we just want that information." The CDA is undertaking a concurrent review of its internal polices and operations, in the wake of other, human-driven errors.

Wood said the move to evaluate the system itself and Motorola is driven by concern for public safety.

"I'm not going to pretend we have not experienced some lack of stability," he said. "I think this is the best avenue to identity some of these issues and make a determination on what to do next."